World Health Organization Likens Covid-19 Pandemic to 1918 ‘Spanish Flu’

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), yesterday likened the Covid-19 pandemic to the so-called “Spanish flu” that killed 100 million people a century ago but said that a similar “catastrophe” could be prevented.

Speaking at a press conference at the organization’s headquarters in Geneva, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus referred to the Covid-19 epidemic as “public enemy number one,” which combines the potential for contagion of the flu with the mortality of MERS and SARS (acute respiratory syndromes also caused by coronaviruses) epidemics.

It is a “very dangerous combination” that is occurring, as happened a hundred years ago (1918/19) and that killed 100 million people, but today we have “a different situation”, we have technology and we can “prevent this catastrophe”, he said.

Tedros Adhanom stressed the dangers posed by the virus, conceded that the worst is yet to come, but stressed that we must believe that fighting the disease is possible, which requires national and global solidarity, he insisted. Because without it “it will be worse”.

“We said that the virus would surprise the most developed countries, and this is occurring”, he dramatically added.

The director also insisted on the need to look at the statistics by considering the numbers, but also the people they represent, so that the Covid-19 pandemic does not become a table with numbers: “Think of the victims of Covid-19 as people and not as numbers”, he urged.

Earlier, the director general had alerted that relaxing the containment measures does not imply that the disease is over and stressed that confinement helps to curb the epidemic, but it does not end it.

Ghebreyesus also mentioned that WHO is working with several bodies in the development of Covid-19 tests.

Epidemiologist Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s chief technical officer in the response to Covid-19, also present at the online press conference, said that there are also many studies on this subject and said that one of them, in pre-publication, suggests that up to 14 percent of the population have antibodies. But she said she did not know what methods were employed for these studies.

However, she stated that the percentage of the infected population is lower than WHO had estimated, which on the other hand means that there is a large part of the world population that can still become infected.

Kerkhove also said that there are over 10,000 genome sequences of the virus available to scientists, which enables them to understand how the virus is changing, and added that there are not many differences, “which is positive”.